Reviews

At most high schools, teachers complain about "senioritis" like
septuagenarians griping about the aches and pains of age. The syndrome,
which manifests itself among seniors as progressive disengagement, is
easy to diagnose but almost impossible to cure.

While hardly a new phenomenon, senioritis has become much more acute
in recent years, writes veteran high school history teacher Sizer.
She's not the first to make this assertion; indeed, a prominent
national commission has been formed to study the problem and propose
remedies. But the case Sizer makes for change is particularly
noteworthy because she draws both from personal experience—she's
taught in public and private institutions—and from her own
research, which includes detailed interviews with some 150seniors from
a diverse group of 26 schools across the country.

One after another, these students describe the senior year as
"blow-off" time, a kind of extended end- of-adolescence celebration.
The reasons Sizer offers for this attitude are varied and somewhat
contradictory. On the one hand, the current generation of high
schoolers, particularly those from the middle class, have been given
just about everything they want by their baby boomer
parents—extravagant birthday parties, diverse entertainment, and
self-esteem-boosting pats on the back. As Sizer astutely notes, they
have been raised in an "atmosphere of welcome and admiration." It's no
wonder so many feel a sense of entitlement.

Yet these kids who've been indulged in so many ways also have had to
compete more vigorously than ever before to get accepted to the
colleges of their choice. This means they've had to take and do well in
a number of specific courses as well as score high on the SAT. They've
also had to pad their high school records with all sorts of impressive
nonacademic experiences. "I need extracurricular activities to dress up
my college applications," one senior acknowledges. "One way or another,
I have to pump up the stats." By senior year, many are burned out.

For all practical purposes, seniors consider themselves finished
with high school once they've submitted their college applications.
Knowing that the remaining courses and grades count for little, many
relax and refuse to work, and they expect their teachers to ease up,
too. Those teachers who don't, Sizer writes, risk "more than
disengagement; they may face punishment."

So what should high schools do? The author, who is married to
well-known progressive educator Theodore Sizer, proposes that the
senior year become a time for students to examine issues pertinent to
this transitional period of their lives. Much of this would be done,
Sizer writes, in the "senior seminar," during which students would read
and discuss literature "about leaving home, about formative
experiences, about autonomy and community." In a more practical vein,
they might also undertake a comparative study of college curricula or
costs.

Sizer also wants seniors to immerse themselves in long-term projects
on topics that engage them emotionally and intellectually. Students
interested in theater might write and produce plays. A promising young
scientist might study the causes of pollution in a local lake or
stream. At the end of the year, they would present their projects to
members of the school community.

Unfortunately, most of these ideas will not be easy to implement at
typical high schools. Thanks in part to college and university
admission requirements, most secondary school academic programs are
inflexible, obliging students to continue amassing traditional credits
right up to graduation. Still, reworking the senior year along the
lines Sizer suggests is certainly a worthwhile goal if we want
graduates to leave high school with a genuine sense of accomplishment.
Too many now leave feeling disappointed with themselves for their
dismal senior-year performances.

In what is essentially a back-to-basics tract, Rochester, a
professor of political science at the University of Missouri at St.
Louis, denounces a wide rangeof popular
classroomapproaches—cooperative learning, whole language, fuzzy
math, and others—as examples of the progressivism that is ruining
public education. He tersely dismisses progressivism as "absolute
nonsense" and "an utter failure" and claims it's the reason our kids
can no longer read and write and why they need intensive remediation
when they enter college.

This book is typical of the anti-public school genre, relying
heavily on personal experience—Rochester's children attended
public schools in the 1980s—and collected anecdotes, most of them
examples of teacher stupidity. He then juxtaposes these highly
subjective impressions with hand-picked test-score data and the like to
give his argument an objective air.

Amazingly, while attacking the laxity and trendiness of public
education, he virtually ignores the imposing impact in recent years of
the standards and accountability movement. And in one spot, he decries
a perceived drift toward less and less homework, when, in fact, the
current trend is exactly the opposite. If Rochester's book, to borrow
his own words, isn't absolute nonsense, it's certainly an utter
failure.

A professor of education at the University of Florida and a highly
regarded reading expert, Allington writes that he was preparing "to
slide into retirement" until a disturbing development caught his
attention. Policymakers at the federal and state levels, he noticed,
were using dubious "findings" from the 2000 National Reading Panel
Report to write legislation requiring rigid phonics instruction in
public schools.

Although hardly an apologist for whole language (he has criticized
its excesses), Allington decided to stay and fight what he and the
other reading specialists who contributed to this volume see as wayward
ideology masquerading as scientific research. The result is a
compelling book that calls into question the ascension of phonics
instruction to the exclusion of almost everything else.

The authors amass substantial evidence to show that they are not
exaggerating when they warn thata "nothing but phonics" trend is
sweeping the country. At least 26 states have passed "phonics bills,"
many with specific language about the "appropriate" way to teach
reading. Pennsylvania, for one, stipulates that schools should offer
"an exact, concentrated, thorough, sequential presentation of phonetic
knowledge through techniques and practices which are introduced
incrementally, logically, and systematically."

What the authors find particularly galling is that lawmakers and
education bureaucrats rarely mention children reading and discussing
rich literature. The emphasis, it seems, is on what one contributor
describes as "decodable texts." Allington himself writes that the
current state and national frameworks for teaching reading emphasize
"the lowest-level proficiencies—the ones that are easiest to
accomplish and measure."

Ironically, U.S. 4th graders finished second in recent international
comparisons of reading achievement, ahead of such high- literacy
countries as Sweden and France. Maybe, one wonders after finishing this
persuasive volume, politically motivated policymakers are trying to
"fix" something that isn't broken at all.

—David Ruenzel

Vol. 14, Issue 5, Page 35

Published in Print: February 1, 2003, as Reviews

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